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Scientific Studies of Reading

ISSN: 1088-8438 (Print) 1532-799X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hssr20

Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of SightWord Reading, Spelling Memory, and VocabularyLearning

Linnea C. Ehri

To cite this article: Linnea C. Ehri (2014) Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight WordReading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning, Scientific Studies of Reading, 18:1, 5-21,DOI: 10.1080/10888438.2013.819356

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2013.819356

Published online: 26 Sep 2013.

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Scientific Studies of Reading, 18:5–21, 2014Copyright © 2014 Society for the Scientific Study of ReadingISSN: 1088-8438 print/1532-799X onlineDOI: 10.1080/10888438.2013.819356

Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight WordReading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning

Linnea C. EhriGraduate Center of the City University of New York

Orthographic mapping (OM) involves the formation of letter-sound connections to bond the spellings,pronunciations, and meanings of specific words in memory. It explains how children learn to readwords by sight, to spell words from memory, and to acquire vocabulary words from print. Thisdevelopment is portrayed by Ehri (2005a) as a sequence of overlapping phases, each character-ized by the predominant type of connection linking spellings of words to their pronunciations inmemory. During development, the connections improve in quality and word-learning value, fromvisual nonalphabetic, to partial alphabetic, to full grapho-phonemic, to consolidated grapho-syllabicand grapho-morphemic. OM is enabled by phonemic awareness and grapheme-phoneme knowledge.Recent findings indicate that OM to support sight word reading is facilitated when beginners aretaught about articulatory features of phonemes and when grapheme-phoneme relations are taughtwith letter-embedded picture mnemonics. Vocabulary learning is facilitated when spellings accom-pany pronunciations and meanings of new words to activate OM. Teaching students the strategyof pronouncing novel words aloud as they read text silently activates OM and helps them build theirvocabularies. Because spelling-sound connections are retained in memory, they impact the processingof phonological constituents and phonological memory for words.

A major hurdle for beginning readers is learning to read words from memory accurately and auto-matically in or out of text. Sight of the word activates its pronunciation and meaning immediatelyin memory and allows readers to focus their attention on comprehension rather than word recog-nition. Other ways of reading words serve as tools that transform unfamiliar words into familiarsight words. For example, decoding letters into blended sounds helps readers figure out wordsthey have not read before. Rereading them a few times moves the words into memory so they canbe read by sight. People used to regard sight words as limited to high-frequency or irregularlyspelled words, but it turns out that all words when practiced become read from memory by sight.

The focus of this article is to review how sight words are retained in memory as childrenlearn to read, to clarify the central role played by letter-sound connections and orthographicmapping, and to consider recent findings that extend our understanding of these processes.Orthographic mapping occurs when, in the course of reading specific words, readers form con-nections between written units, either single graphemes or larger spelling patterns, and spokenunits, either phonemes, syllables or morphemes. These connections are retained in memory along

Correspondence should be sent to Linnea C. Ehri, Program in Educational Psychology, CUNY Graduate Center,365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016. E-mail: LEhri@gc.cuny.edu

6 EHRI

with meanings and enable readers to recognize the words by sight. An important consequenceof orthographic mapping is that the spellings of words enter memory and influence vocabularylearning, the processing of phonological constituents in words, and phonological memory.

WORD READING STRATEGIES AND ORTHOGRAPHIC MAPPING

Children are taught to read words in multiple ways, by applying strategies to read words that areunfamiliar in print, and by retrieving from memory words that have been read before and storedin memory. Several strategies might be used to read unfamiliar words. Readers might use theirknowledge of the writing system to apply a decoding strategy. The writing system consists ofgraphemes that are single letters or digraphs that represent the smallest sounds or phonemes inwords, for example, B represents /b/, PH represents /f/. It also includes larger grapho-syllabicand morphemic spelling-sound units (e.g., -ump, -tion, -ed, -ing; Moats, 2000). Decoding involvestransforming graphemes into a blend of phonemes, or transforming spelling patterns into a blendof syllabic units and then searching the mental lexicon (word memory) for a familiar spoken wordthat matches the blend and fits the context. In languages with regular grapheme-phoneme rela-tions, such as Spanish, decoding is straightforward. However, the English writing system includesmultiple ways to pronounce letters and to spell sounds in words as well as spelling irregularities,so readers must be flexible and expect variability when they blend letters to form recognizablewords. For example, if they decode stomach as “stow – match,” they must try other pronunci-ations to figure out the real word (Tunmer & Chapman, 2012). This is helped by a meaningfulcontext.

Another strategy for reading unfamiliar words is by analogy. This involves finding in memorythe parallel spelling of a known word and adjusting its pronunciation to match letters in theunknown word (e.g., reading thump by analogy to jump). As beginners accumulate a larger storeof written words in memory, this strategy becomes more useful.

The third strategy for reading unfamiliar words is by prediction. Readers use initial letters pluscontext cues in the sentence, the passage, or pictures to anticipate what the word might be. Oncea word is predicted, then its pronunciation is matched to the spelling on the page to verify thatthe sounds fit the letters.

Whereas unfamiliar words are read by the application of print strategies, words that havebeen read before are read from memory. Ehri (1992, 1998, 2005a, 2005b) referred to these assight words because sight of the word immediately activates its pronunciation and meaning inmemory. To build sight words in memory, orthographic mapping is required. Readers must formconnections between the spellings and pronunciations of specific words by applying knowledgeof the general writing system. When readers see a new word and say or hear its pronunciation,its spelling becomes mapped onto its pronunciation and meaning. These mapping connectionsserve to “glue” spellings to their pronunciation in memory. For example, if a reader knows thatthe graphemes T and OW commonly symbolize the phonemes /t/ and /o/, respectively, thenwhen the word TOW is seen and pronounced, two connections are formed linking T and OWto their phonemes, and the spelling is bonded to its pronunciation in memory. If a reader knowsgrapho-syllabic spellings as letter-sound units, then when a word such as excellent is seen, threeconnections are formed between the spelling units, ex, cell, ent, and their sounds to retain theword in memory. Processing the meanings of words bonds semantic connections to the word

LEARNING TO READ WORDS 7

units as well. This enables readers to read words immediately from memory, thus precluding theneed to apply word reading strategies to figure out the words.

To form connections and retain words in memory, readers need some requisite abilities. Theymust possess phonemic awareness (i.e., the ability to focus on and manipulate phonemes inspeech), particularly segmentation and blending. They must know the major grapheme-phonemecorrespondences of the writing system. At a more advanced level, they need to know grapho-syllabic spelling-sound patterns. Then they need to be able to read unfamiliar words on their own,by applying a decoding, analogy, or prediction strategy. Application of these strategies activatesorthographic mappings to retain the words’ spellings, pronunciations, and meanings in memory.Share (2004b, 2008) referred to this as a self-teaching mechanism. With repeated readings thatactivate orthographic mapping, written words are retained in memory to support reading andspelling.

When readers can read words from memory rather than by decoding, analogy, or prediction,text reading is greatly facilitated. Readers are able to read and comprehend more rapidly and tofocus their attention on meanings while word recognition happens automatically. Although wordreading strategies are no longer needed to identify words once they can be read from memory,decoding and prediction may still be activated as backup to confirm that the words identified fitthe spelling and the context or to signal a mismatch needing repair (Perfetti, 1985).

Readers differ in the connections that are activated to bond the identities of words in memory.Perfetti (2007) proposed the concept of lexical quality to capture variation in the representa-tions of words that are formed in memory to support reading and spelling. Words that are highin lexical quality (LQ) consist of complete spellings that are fully connected to their pronun-ciations at grapho-phonemic or syllabic levels in memory. High LQ also includes knowing themeanings of words in various contexts as well as pragmatic uses of the words. Possession ofhigh LQ representations of words facilitates not only accurate word recognition but also readingcomprehension.

PHASES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF WORD READING SKILLS

Pinpointing when children begin reading words depends on what is counted as word reading.Very young children can read their own names and words in environmental print but they cannotdecode novel words. During development the strategies children possess for reading unfamiliarwords expand as well as the types of connections to read and spell words from memory. Thesedevelopmental paths are captured in Ehri’s (2005a) phase theory, which is centered on the acqui-sition of sight word reading but also portrays the emergence of skills and strategies that supportsight word reading. Characteristics of the phases are summarized in Table 1.

According to Ehri (2005a), the storage of written words in memory for reading and spellingdevelops in phases which are labeled to reflect the predominant types of connections that areformed to remember how to read words, with the types transitioning from nonalphabetic to partialletter names or letter sounds to full grapho-phonemic to grapho-syllabic.

During the prealphabetic phase, children lack knowledge of the writing system, so they relymainly on salient visual or contextual features to read words, features such as logos accompany-ing signs in the environment or semantic cues such as the two eyes in look. They may pretend to

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LEARNING TO READ WORDS 9

read stories they have heard before, but they cannot point to the written words they are saying,indicating that they are relying on memory rather than print cues. They may recognize their ownname written down and name its letters. They may spell words using scribbles, familiar letters, ornumbers. However, because their word reading and writing do not involve the use of letter-soundconnections, they are prealphabetic.

Children advance to the partial alphabetic phase when they learn letter names or sounds andcan use them to remember how to read words by forming partial connections linking the moresalient letters to sounds in pronunciations, for example, first and final letter-sounds. Partial phasereaders might remember how to read jail by connecting the letters J and L to their names heardin the word’s pronunciation (e.g., /je/ and /εl/; Ehri & Wilce, 1985). However, the connectionsformed are incomplete as a result of limited phonemic awareness and grapheme-phoneme knowl-edge, particularly vowels. One result of having partial representations of words is that similarlyspelled words may be confused. Partial phase readers have little or no use of decoding or analogystrategies. To read unfamiliar words, they rely mainly on predicting words from initial letters andcontext cues. When they spell words, they write some of the letters accurately to represent soundsbut they have difficulty remembering and writing words completely and correctly.

Children advance to the full alphabetic phase when they can form complete connectionsbetween graphemes and phonemes to read words from memory. Acquisition of a decodingstrategy facilitates this process. Beginners acquire knowledge of the major grapheme-phonemecorrespondences and the ability to segment pronunciations into phonemes. This enables them tomap the spellings of words onto their pronunciations and retain these connections in memoryalong with meanings. Readers become able to recognize words automatically without attentionor effort needed to transform letters into sounds. Sight of the word activates its pronunciation andmeaning in memory immediately. The word is read as a single unit rather than sounded out letterby letter (Ehri & Wilce, 1983). Completely connected sight words are initially short monosyllabicwords, but they grow to include longer words.

Full alphabetic phase readers can learn to read words by analogy, but they are limited bythe size of their memory for sight words, which are needed as the base for analogizing. Theycan write phonetically complete spellings of unfamiliar words by segmenting pronunciations intophonemes and writing letters for each. They can remember correct spellings of words much betterthan partial alphabetic phase readers because they can connect spellings fully to pronunciationsin memory.

As fully connected words and word parts accumulate in memory and can be read as singleunits, children move closer to the consolidated alphabetic phase. Connections linking spellingsto pronunciations are formed out of grapheme-phoneme blends that have become consolidatedinto larger spelling-sound units (Bhattacharya & Ehri, 2004; Treiman, Goswami, & Bruck, 1990).These units include spelling patterns that recur in multiple words (e.g., -ump in jump, pump,bump, dump), sight words that form parts of longer words (e.g., in – pin, at – bat, and – sand,up – cup), and recurring syllabic and morphemic spelling units (e.g., root words and affixes). It iseasier to remember how to read multisyllabic words during this phase than during the full phasebecause fewer connections need be formed, for example, only two grapho-syllabic versus sevengrapho-phonemic connections to store the word comfort in memory. As readers’ print lexicons ofwords grow, the analogy strategy becomes more useful for reading words. As they acquire moreknowledge about spelling patterns, their ability to remember how to spell words fitting thesepatterns grows.

10 EHRI

Phase theory has been questioned by some researchers who suggest that the development ofsight word reading is continuous rather than divisible into discrete phases (Cunningham, Nathan,& Raher, 2011). However, continuity is not disputed by phase theory. Sight words are viewedas accumulating continuously in memory. It is the predominant type of orthographic connec-tion that is distinct and that changes with development, from nonalphabetic to partial to full andthen to consolidated. The succession of phases resemble overlapping waves (Siegler, 1996) ratherthan discrete stages. As proposed by Siegler, children acquire multiple ways of processing infor-mation during development, and these ways change gradually in the frequency of their use asmore advanced ways emerge and predominate. To illustrate overlapping waves that characterizephases, children in the partial phase become able to form full grapho-phonemic connections toread and spell shorter words but still use partial cues for longer words. Children in the full phaselearn some consolidated units such as -ing early during this phase. These larger units accumulategradually during the full phase. Instruction in larger syllabic and morphemic units can facilitatethis accumulation and hence movement into the next phase when they predominate. Likewisedecoding instruction during the partial phase facilitates movement to the full phase.

FACILITATING SIGHT WORD LEARNING IN BEGINNERS

Several earlier studies have provided evidence for the development of sight word learning inphases (see Ehri, 1987, 1992, 1998, 2005a, 2005b, for reviews). Some recent studies have focusedon the partial alphabetic phase and have clarified how training in phonemic awareness and letterknowledge can improve children’s ability to read words from memory.

Phonemic Awareness

Many studies have shown that teaching children phonemic awareness enhances their word read-ing and spelling (Ehri et al., 2001). The type of phonemic awareness that is thought to underliethe process of connecting graphemes to phonemes is the ability to segment pronunciations intophonemes. Which property of phonemes forms these connections has remained unclear. It is com-mon for teachers to direct students’ attention to the sounds that are heard in words. However, thereis reason to believe that sounds processed by the ear are less central than articulatory gesturesproduced by mouth movements in saying words. According to the motor theory of speech percep-tion (Liberman, 1999), articulatory gestures rather than acoustic features represent phonemes inthe brain. Also, ease of processing favors gestures. Whereas sounds are ephemeral and disappearas soon as they are heard, mouth positions are tangible and can be felt, viewed in a mirror, andanalyzed by learners.

We conducted two phonemic awareness experiments to determine whether teaching childrento analyze articulatory gestures in words would better secure spellings to pronunciations in mem-ory and hence improve their sight word learning (Boyer & Ehri, 2011; Castiglioni-Spalten &Ehri, 2003). We reasoned that if articulation is central to the phonemic representation of words inmemory, then enhancing children’s sensitivity to the articulatory properties of phonemes shouldstrengthen the grapheme-phoneme connections that are formed to remember how to read words.In the Boyer and Ehri study, 4- and 5-year-old preschoolers who knew letter names but werein the prealphabetic phase were randomly assigned to three groups. Children in the letters only

LEARNING TO READ WORDS 11

condition were taught associations between 15 graphemes and phonemes and how to use themto segment and spell the phonemes in CV (consonant, vowel), VC, and CVC words and non-words. Phonetic spellings, with one grapheme for each phoneme, rather than correct spellingswere taught (e.g., MO rather than MOW). Children in the letters plus articulation group receivedthe same instruction with letters, but in addition they learned associations between 15 phonemesand eight mouth pictures depicting articulatory positions of the phonemes, for example, a pictureof a mouth with closed lips to depict /b/, /p/, and /m/; a picture of a mouth with teeth touch-ing the lower lip to depict /f/ and /v/; or a mouth open with lips pulled together and rounded todepict /o/. Then they were taught to segment CV, VC, and CVC pronunciations with these mouthpictures, for example, selecting the picture of closed lips and then the picture of open roundedlips to depict /mo/. A third control group received no instruction. Once children in the treatmentgroups learned the association and segmentation skills to criterion, they were given a sight wordlearning task to see whether articulatory training improved the letters plus articulation group’sability to learn to read the words more than the other two groups.

In the sight word learning task, children received several practice trials with feedback to learnto read six words spelled phonetically with the trained letters: BO (bow), SA (say), TE (tea), BEK(beak), SOP (soap), TAL (tail). As evident in Figure 1, the articulation group learned to read thewords more easily than both of the other groups. It took the letters plus articulation group fourtrials on average to read most of the words, whereas it took the letters only group eight trials.The no-treatment control group read fewer than two words by the eighth trial. Moreover, 1 weeklater, the articulation group showed the same advantage in learning a second set of words. Thesefindings paralleled those in an earlier study (Castiglioni-Spalten & Ehri, 2003). Our interpreta-tion is that articulation training improved children’s access to the motoric gestures configuringthe phonemic representations of words in memory. As a result, during the sight word learningtrials, letters in the words became more securely attached to these motoric phonemic constituentsto support word reading. Other studies have also shown that place of articulation influences chil-dren’s sight word learning (Laing & Hulme, 1999; Rack, Hulme, Snowling & Wightman, 1994).These findings suggest the value of teaching phoneme segmentation with mouth pictures.

These results bear on Ehri’s (2005a) phase theory. When children began this study, they werein the prealphabetic phase. They knew some letters but had little ability to read or spell words.During the study, two of the groups were taught the requisite alphabetic knowledge—phonemicawareness and grapheme-phoneme relations. On word reading and spelling tests given at the endof training, children receiving this instruction far outperformed the no-treatment control group,indicating that these skills moved children from the prealphabetic to the partial alphabetic phaseof development.

Letter Knowledge

Grapheme-phoneme knowledge is critical for enabling students to build a reliable vocabularyof sight words. One source for learning grapheme-phoneme relations comes from letter names.In English most letter names contain phonemes commonly symbolized by those letters in words(e.g., bee /b/, eff /f/, jay /j/). Studies have shown that beginners who know letter shapes andnames can use this knowledge to learn sounds in the names (Cardoso-Martins, Mesquita, & Ehri,2011; Share, 2004a) and to remember how to read words they have seen better than children whodo not know names (Ehri & Wilce, 1985; Roberts, 2003).

12 EHRI

Tr 1 Tr 2 Tr 3 Tr 4 Tr 5 Tr 6 Tr 7 Tr 8

Me

an

Co

rre

ct

LPA

LO

Control

6

5

4

3

2

1

0

Trials

FIGURE 1 Mean number of words read correctly (six maximum) by4-year-olds on each trial during the sight word learning posttest for thegroups trained with letters and articulation pictures (LPA) and with lettersonly (LO) and by the no-treatment control group. From “Contribution ofPhonemic Segmentation Instruction With Letters and Articulation Picturesto Word Reading and Spelling in Beginners” by N. Boyer and L. Ehri,2011, Scientific Studies of Reading, 15, p. 459. Copyright 2011 by theSociety for the Scientific Study of Reading. Reprinted with permission.(Color figure available online.)

If children do not know letter names, then teaching them all of the arbitrary, meaninglessshapes, names, and sounds takes time. An approach that eases the task is to use embedded picturemnemonics. These are not just any letter–picture pairs, but ones that bear a special relationshipto each other. The basic principle for constructing embedded picture mnemonics is to identifyan object (e.g., snake) whose name begins with the sound of the letter to be taught (/s/) andwhose shape can be drawn to resemble the shape of the letter (S). Other examples are M drawnas mountains, T drawn as a table. To the extent that learners can look at the letter, be remindedof the object because of the shared shapes, say the object’s name, and segment its initial soundto produce the sound of the letter, the mnemonic is effective in linking the letter shape to itsphoneme in memory. With practice, letter shapes are learned and associations between letters andsounds are established in memory. Ehri, Deffner, and Wilce (1984) showed that embedded picturemnemonics were more effective in teaching children grapheme-phoneme correspondences thanwere the same objects drawn in a different shape from the letter (e.g., snake coiled or stretchedout, called disassociated mnemonics) and more effective than practice associating letters, objectsand sounds without any pictures.

More recently we conducted an experiment applying this principle to teach Hebrewletter-sounds to children who spoke English but no Hebrew (Shmidman & Ehri, 2010).In our study, embedded picture mnemonics were created to teach 5-year-old children Hebrew

LEARNING TO READ WORDS 13

0

1

2

3

4

5

Tr 1 Tr 2 Tr 3 Tr 4 Tr 5

Embedded

Disassoc.

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etter-

Sounds C

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Learning Trials

FIGURE 2 Mean number of letter-sound correspondences recalled (fivemaximum) over the first five learning trials by 5-year-olds in the embeddedmnemonics and disassociated mnemonics conditions. From “EmbeddedPicture Mnemonics to Learn Letters” by A. Shmidman & L. Ehri, 2010,Scientific Studies of Reading, 14, p. 173. Copyright 2010 by the Society forthe Scientific Study of Reading. Reprinted with permission. (Color figureavailable online.)

grapheme-phoneme correspondences using English object names as the mnemonics. For exam-ple, was drawn as a house symbolizing /h/, was drawn as a ship with sails symbolizing /sh/,and was drawn as a key symbolizing /k/. Students were taught grapheme-phoneme relationswith these embedded picture mnemonics in one condition. In the control condition, students weretaught with disassociated mnemonics having the same object names and meanings but drawn dif-ferently from the shapes of the letters. Children in both conditions were taught to segment andpronounce the initial phonemes in the object names. Then they completed as many practice trialsas was necessary to be able to recall all of the sounds perfectly when they were shown the bareletters. Results revealed that children took fewer trials to master letter-sounds taught with embed-ded mnemonics than with disassociated mnemonics. Learning during the first five trials is shownin Figure 2. Compared to disassociated letters, embedded letters were less frequently mixed upduring learning and were remembered better on posttests 1 week later.

The children were in the prealphabetic phase when they began this study. They had no knowl-edge of Hebrew, and they had little ability to read English primer words. We examined whetherthey would be able to use their newly acquired letter-sound knowledge to function at the partialalphabetic phase in reading and spelling English words written with Hebrew letter-sounds. Afterchildren had learned the letter-sound correspondences, they practiced reading simplified spellingsof 10 English CVC words written phonetically with Hebrew consonants (e.g., read as shake).Also children were given Hebrew letter blocks to spell the consonant sounds in English CVCwords. Results showed that performance of the embedded mnemonics group was significantlybetter in both the sight word learning and spelling tasks than performance of the disassociatedmnemonics group.

These findings carry implications for instruction. Embedded picture mnemonics offer an effec-tive way to teach grapheme-phoneme relations to beginners, especially children having letter

14 EHRI

learning difficulties. Embedded mnemonics can be used to teach harder-to-learn correspondencessuch as the short vowels sounds of A, E, I, O, and U; the consonants W, Y, and H; and the hardsounds for C /k/, and G /g/, all letters whose names do not contain their sounds. Also embeddedmnemonics can be devised to teach letter-sound correspondences to students learning a foreignlanguage as was done in this study.

ORTHOGRAPHIC MAPPING TO FACILITATE VOCABULARY LEARNING

We have also conducted studies to examine the connection forming process in more advancedreaders, those functioning at the full and consolidated alphabetic phases in their word reading.Of interest here are studies examining the contribution of orthographic mapping for building thepronunciations and meanings of new vocabulary words in memory.

Students learn new vocabulary words not only by hearing them but also by reading them inprint. Based on our work showing that spellings become bonded to pronunciations in memory,we wondered whether showing students the written forms of novel words would enhance vocab-ulary learning. Traditionally, spellings have not been considered an important contributor. Theprevailing view has been that when an unknown word is encountered in print, students pronounceit and then store the pronunciation with its meaning in memory. The spelling is left out on thepage. However, as just discussed, this is not so.

In our study, students were taught the spoken forms and meanings of several unfamiliar, low-frequency words (Ehri, 2005b; Rosenthal & Ehri, 2008). Second graders participated in oneexperiment, fifth graders in another. The same designs were used, but the words were harder in thelatter study. Fifth graders were taught 10 words, for example, vibrissa (the whiskers on a cat) andtamarack (a big tree), whereas second graders were taught 6 words, for example, sod (wet, grassyground) and pap (soft mushy food for babies). In each experiment, the words were pronounced,defined, embedded in sentences, and depicted in drawings on flash cards. Children were givenseveral practice trials to learn the pronunciations and meanings of the words. On each trial theywere prompted to recall either the pronunciation or the meaning of each word. In one condition,spellings appeared on the cards during study and feedback periods but not when children recalledthe words. In the control condition, the same procedures were followed except that students werenot shown spellings. To compensate, they pronounced the words extra times. Results were clearin showing the benefit of spellings at both grade levels.

In the fifth-grade experiment, students were grouped by reading/spelling ability into higherand lower levels. Figure 3 shows how well they recalled pronunciations of the words acrosslearning trials when spellings had been seen and when they had not. It is evident that both abilitygroups remembered pronunciations much better when they had been exposed to their spellings,especially the higher readers. Note that spellings were not present when students recalled pronun-ciations so the benefit had to come from memory. This was evident in the comments of studentswho had seen spellings. In trying to recall hicatee (a kind of turtle), one student said, “I knowthere are two ‘ees’ at the end.” Two other students named some of the letters before recallingthe words. Exposure to spellings also enhanced students’ recall of word meanings compared tonot seeing spellings. Results were similar in the experiment with second graders, revealing thatspellings facilitate vocabulary learning in younger as well as older readers. It took longer to learn

LEARNING TO READ WORDS 15

Hi Readers,

Spell seen

Lo Readers,

Spell seen

Hi Readers,

Spell not seen

Lo Readers,

Spell not seen

Hi Readers

Lo Readers

FIGURE 3 Mean number of pronunciations (10 maximum) recalledover five learning trials by higher and lower ability fifth-grade readers inthe spelling seen and spelling not seen conditions. From “The MnemonicValue of Orthography for Vocabulary Learning” by J. Rosenthal & L. Ehri,2008, Journal of Educational Psychology, 100, p. 184. Copyright 2008 bythe American Psychological Association. Reprinted with permission.

the pronunciations than the meanings of the words, indicating that exposure to spellings wasimportant in facilitating the harder part of vocabulary learning.

Gathercole (2006) suggested that superior phonological working memory for novel wordsexplains why good readers are better at building their vocabularies than poor readers. However,our findings suggest that orthographic knowledge is more important than phonological mem-ory. Comparison of the performance of students higher and lower in reading ability in Figure 3(see the broken lines) reveals that the higher readers outperformed the lower readers by verylittle in remembering pronunciations of the novel words when they had only practiced hearingand saying the words during learning. This indicates only a small difference in phonologicalmemory. However, higher readers were far superior to lower readers in remembering pronun-ciations when spellings were seen during learning (compare the solid lines). This suggests thatonce students become literate, superior ability to connect spellings to pronunciations in memoryexplains why good readers build larger vocabularies than poor readers, not phonological workingmemory.

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Our explanation of the facilitative effects of spellings on vocabulary learning is that whenstudents were shown spellings as they heard and pronounced the words, connections wereformed. Spellings became bonded to pronunciations, clarified their phonemic constituents, andstrengthened their phonological representations in memory. Meanings became better connectedas well. From previous research, we know that letters in spellings of new words are rememberedeasily. Share (2004b) found that third graders remembered letters in novel words after only oneexposure, and they remembered them as long as 1 month later. This suggests that, in our study,spellings served to establish in memory a word base that was more substantial and formed earlierduring learning than that formed by the pronunciation-meaning bond without spellings. Othershave replicated the effects of exposure to spellings on vocabulary learning (Ricketts, Bishop, &Nation, 2009).

In an earlier study, we found that not only seeing spellings but also directing second gradersto imagine the spellings of novel CVC words improved their memory for their pronunciationscompared to students who only practiced saying the words extra times (Experiment 4, Ehri &Wilce, 1979). Knowledge of grapho-phonemic connections prescribed by the writing system pro-vides readers with clear expectations about how pronounced words might be spelled (Stuart &Coltheart, 1988) and spellings are visual forms so it is not surprising that students can generateimages of written words in their heads.

Extension to Text Reading

Beyond the early years, children’s vocabularies grow substantially from reading text (Nagy &Scott, 2000). However, when students read text silently on their own, they may not bother topronounce unfamiliar words but rather may skip over them and just infer their meanings. As aresult, connections are not formed to secure the new words in memory. Skipping unknown wordsmay be especially characteristic of students with weaker decoding skills and may retard theirvocabulary growth compared to good readers. This may contribute to Matthew Effects (i.e., therich getting richer in vocabulary knowledge) observed to distinguish good from poor readers overtime (Cain & Oakhill, 2011).

We undertook a study to examine students’ learning of new vocabulary words as they read textsilently (Rosenthal & Ehri, 2011). Fifth graders were randomly assigned to one of two target wordreading conditions, a read-aloud condition and a silent condition. Higher and lower ability read-ers were distinguished. They read silently eight passages, each about 100 words. Each passageelaborated the meaning of a low-frequency target word that appeared three times, was underlined,defined, discussed, and depicted with a drawing. Students in one condition were directed to readthe texts silently but when they came to the underlined (target) words, they were to pronouncethem aloud. In the control condition, students also read the texts silently. When they came tounderlined words, they were told to pencil a check next to the words if they had seen them before,but nothing was said about reading the words aloud. The purpose of the check was to make surethat controls at least stopped and looked at the target words. Students in both conditions adheredto the instructions.

Results showed that the oral word reading strategy enhanced vocabulary learning significantlyin both better and weaker readers compared to the silent condition. After reading the text, stu-dents orally recalled the story they had read. Figure 4 shows these results. The two bars on the left

LEARNING TO READ WORDS 17

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

3.5

4

4.5

5

Used Words to

Retell Story

Recalled Words

for Definition

Spelled Words

Correctly

Me

an

Wo

rd

s R

eca

lle

d (

8 m

ax

)

Memory for Vocabulary Words

Read Silently

Read Aloud

FIGURE 4 Mean vocabulary words produced, recalled and spelled cor-rectly (eight maximum) after fifth graders silently read a passage andeither pronounced the underlined vocabulary words aloud or read themsilently. Data for this figure extracted from Rosenthal and Ehri (2011).(Color figure available online.)

show that those in the aloud condition included the vocabulary words more frequently in their oralretellings than students in the silent condition. The latter students used synonyms more often. Themiddle bars show that students who spoke the words learned the meaning–pronunciation associa-tions better than those who did not. The third pair of bars shows that speaking the words enhancedstudents’ memory for their spellings. Note that students never wrote the words so memory forspellings was improved simply by pronouncing the written words aloud.

We examined whether poorer readers might show bigger effects than better readers. Becausepoorer readers have more trouble decoding novel words, they might skip over them during silentreading, so their word learning might be especially depressed compared to the aloud condition.This is what we found. Effect sizes were moderate to large favoring the aloud over the silenttreatment in both reader groups across the three measures in Figure 4. However, effect sizes weresubstantially larger for poorer readers. On two measures, effect sizes were about twice as great:recalling pronunciations, d = 1.58 (poor readers) vs. 0.71 (good readers); recalling spellings, d =1.07 (poor readers) vs. 0.61 (good readers). This shows that forcing the poorer readers to say thewords aloud was especially beneficial. They had some ability to decode the words but they wereless inclined to do so when they read them silently.

Findings of these vocabulary learning studies are explained by orthographic mapping. Theysupport two conclusions and implications for practice. The first is that exposing students to thespellings of spoken vocabulary words helps them learn the words compared to only hearing

18 EHRI

and saying the words. This suggests that teachers should display spellings as part of vocabu-lary instruction to enhance learning. The second conclusion is that students should be directedto pronounce new vocabulary words aloud when encountering them in text. By transformingletters into sounds, this strategy helps to form connections and retain the words’ spellings,pronunciations, and meanings in memory.

IMPACT OF ORTHOGRAPHIC MAPPING ON PHONOLOGICAL REPRESENTATIONS

According to our theory and evidence, spellings of words are retained in memory when their let-ters become bonded to phonemes and syllables in their pronunciations. If so, then spellings shouldinfluence how people perceive and process the sounds in words. In the Rosenthal and Ehri (2008)study just described, we showed in Figure 3 that orthographic mapping better explained theacquisition of new vocabulary words including their pronunciations than phonological workingmemory. Other research has provided supportive evidence as well (Ehri, 1984).

Grapho-phonemic mapping has been shown to influence how people segment words into pho-netic constituents, particularly when there is ambiguity. For example, the endings of pitch andrich are pronounced identically yet pitch contains an extra letter T potentially drawing atten-tion to an extra sound which can be detected in articulating pitch (i.e., tongue touching theroof of the mouth). To determine whether readers would segment pitch into more sounds thanrich, fourth graders were given a segmentation task in which they had to pronounce the sepa-rate sounds in words and move tokens for each. No spellings were present. As expected, mostfound four sounds in p-i-t-ch but only three in r-i-ch. Spelling-based segmentation of ambigu-ous sounds were replicated for other pairs of words as well (i.e., /t/ in catch vs. much, /d/

in badge vs. page; Ehri & Wilce, 1980). In another study, spellings influenced syllable seg-mentation. Students who knew how to spell a word such as interesting segmented it into thefour syllables represented in the spelling (in-ter-est-ing), whereas those who misspelled the wordtended to find three segments (in-tres-ting) reflecting the way they pronounced the word (Ehri,1987). In a study by Seidenberg and Tanenhaus (1979), spellings influenced rhyme judgments.Students listened to two orally presented words. Their speed to decide “Yes” or “No” whetherthe two words rhymed was measured. They took longer to say “Yes” to rhyming words when thespellings differed (e.g., tomb – room) than when spellings were similar (e.g., boom – room). Theytook longer to say “No” to nonrhyming words when spellings were similar (e.g., tomb – comb)than when they were different (e.g., tomb – come). These are just a few of the studies showingthat when children learn to read, written words bond to spoken words in memory and changethe way people conceptualize their phonological constituents including phonemes, syllables, andrhymes.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Learning to read words is central to children’s success in attaining reading skill. Several abilitiesand skills become integrated as acquisition proceeds. Phonemic awareness and knowledge of thewriting system are applied to read unfamiliar words and to build a vocabulary of high-qualitysight words with spellings fully connected to pronunciations and meanings in memory. The

LEARNING TO READ WORDS 19

accumulation of written words in memory is continuous. However, the predominant connectionsthat are used to remember the words change developmentally, from nonalphabetic visual features,to partial alphabetic connections between some letters and sounds, to full grapho-phonemic con-nections, to consolidated grapho-syllabic connections. These orthographic mapping processesunderlie the emergence of students’ skill in reading words accurately and automatically frommemory.

Use of alphabetic knowledge to connect spellings to pronunciations and retain sight wordsin memory is an internal process that is activated spontaneously when words are seen and theirpronunciations are produced or heard. The spontaneous nature of activation was evident in ourvocabulary learning study described earlier (Rosenthal & Ehri, 2008). Second and fifth graderswere exposed to spellings, but no attention was drawn to them. Students did not actively decodethem. Rather the experimenter pronounced the words as soon as they were seen and studentsrepeated them orally. Nevertheless, connections were formed and spellings were retained in mem-ory as evidenced by their facilitative effect on vocabulary learning. The immediate formation anddurable nature of the resulting connections were evident in Share’s (2004b) self-teaching studyin which third graders read novel words independently in text and showed greater-than-chancelevel memory for their letters a month later after reading them only once.

What sort of instruction teaches students spontaneous orthographic mapping? First, it entailsteaching students the knowledge and skills that enable connections to be activated when words areseen and read. This includes teaching the writing system beginning with grapheme-phoneme rela-tions, teaching phonemic segmentation, and teaching a decoding strategy for reading novel words(Share, 2004b). Second, it entails having students practice using these skills to read and spellwords. Practice may involve having students decode and pronounce unfamiliar words aloud dur-ing independent reading of text (Rosenthal & Ehri, 2011). Practice may involve having studentsexplicitly identify the connections to be formed for specific words by segmenting pronuncia-tions into phonemes and matching them to graphemes seen in spellings (Gaskins, Ehri, Cress,O’Hara, & Donnelly, 1996). Practice may involve recalling these connections to produce correctspellings of words. Practice may involve reading sequences of similarly spelled, single sylla-ble words whose letters change across successive words (e.g., sock, sack, sick, sing, song, sang;Ehri & Wilce, 1987; McCandliss, Sandak, Beck, & Perfetti, 2003). Practice may involve repeat-edly reading sets of multisyllabic words by segmenting them into their grapho-syllabic units(Bhattacharya & Ehri, 2004).

Knowledge of the writing system is a key ingredient in learning to read words, and the rela-tionship is reciprocal. Beginners are taught grapheme-phoneme relations and these are used toread words. As written words accumulate in memory, additional knowledge about the writingsystem is formed, and this in turn facilitates word reading ability. According to phase theory,grapho-phonemic and grapho-syllabic units are major contributors. However, students learn othertypes of orthographic regularities as well. They learn about the statistical properties of spellingsinvolving the co-occurrence of letters (Treiman & Kessler, 2006). They learn about grapho-tacticfeatures involving legitimate and illegitimate letter combinations. Venezky’s (1999) analysesrevealed more than 200 regularities that characterize the English spelling system. Many of theseare learned implicitly as readers’ mental lexicons grow and patterns that recur in different wordsare detected (Tunmer & Nicholson, 2011). As knowledge about the writing system accumulates, itconstrains and refines readers’ expectations about the spellings of words so that when unfamiliarwords are seen on the page and read, they are easier to remember.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I regret that space limitations preclude citation of many studies contributing relevant findings.Additional references can be found in the studies that are cited.

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